Pry yourself AWAY from lecture and TOWARDS “facilitation”
When asked why they chose EMS your brand new EMT candidates will almost universally reply, “I just could never sit behind a desk for 8 hours per day.”
Yet, in many cases, this is exactly what we’ve expected of them during education!
As I grappled with how to best serve the “kinesthetic learner,” I was afraid to move away from lecture…we are already so short on time. It seemed to me anything but “lecture” would be the equivalent of the mess made and extra time used when a toddler “helps” an adult cook. How could I possibly cover all the material without slamming it to them in lecture?
Retention of information by method of delivery.—ROUGH estimate, but you get the idea: traditional “lecture” blows. Image credit: ThePeakPerformanceCenter.com
But then, when we look at the effectiveness of “lecture,” we realize it is a waste of our breath and everyone’s time. Statistics vary, but students are generally doing well if they retain 30% of what we “tell” them.
Instead, we must look for a curiosity hook—adult learners who have a REASON (like immediate curiosity) to seek material answers have a substantially greater retention of the info resulting in less out-of-class study hours! Adults want to be self-guided, so we will help them with that.
As skilled facilitators, we must guide the students into asking us the question(s) about exactly the topics we need to discuss. It is a form of reverse engineering—how do we create the curiosity about the exact topic(s) we want to talk about? How can we make that process inclusive so that it truly IS as discussion?
Attached, find the EMS Intro to Medicolegal In-Class Activity that I devised as an example. I divide the students into groups (more on that later, but YOU should control group membership to keep things balanced), and each group has a specific responsibility from the activity to present/discuss. They are directed to the relevant chapter and asked to be as complete as possible.
The red ink represents notes
to myself—we use the students’ initial comments as a launching point to explore key concepts associated with each question.
Each part of the activity is meant to open the door to definitions and application of common medicolegal terms. Everyone is curious and contributing. We end up covering the entire “lecture” contents but in a more practical way which makes it more “experiential” than “theoretical”—and it takes no more time at all than boring, dry lecture.
The quiz I gave at the next the class session sealed the deal for me. It was the SAME one I’d been using for a few years. Being one of the early quizzes, I was accustomed to students not doing well as they struggled to build their study habits. The massive improvement in grades argues that student involvement kept them focused and curiosity helped seat the material into longer-term memory.
This approach does require some skill from the facilitator in correcting wrong info and keeping everyone on the right path. We have to learn how to redirect both the green over-eager AND the kid with some “experience” who is just trying to show off. This takes finesse in word choice, tone, and body language. If you are not sure how that looks and feels, I highly encourage you do some role-playing with someone you trust to give you honest feedback—heck even a solo self-video is very helpful with this.
Students will be VERY uncomfortable with this type of approach at first…they may even be a bit combative at this new responsibility (to be actively involved in their own learning) dumped in their laps. “How do we know what to write down? How do we know what is important? What will be on the test?”
Answering these questions ahead of time and again as you proceed is part of the communication required of “instructional leadership.” You need to plan how you will handle these student objections and the underlying insecurities.
We must also keep in mind that these students have rarely been held to an academic standard or deadline. They have only minimal experience with critical thinking—in fact, they’ve been so shoved into the academic rigidity of regurgitation so much that one of our main jobs is to FREE them. I usually just explain this exact psychology to them near the beginning of our first “scary” alternative activity. They all giggle when I pronounce, “YOU ARE NOW FREE!!”
And you, dear educator, can now forge a new path yourself and all kinds of experiences for your students. As long as you clearly keep your objective in mind, your own creativity is the only limit and the magic of those created moments is boundless.
YOU ARE NOW FREE!